Maritime companies in particular are increasingly subject to cyber attacks via their trading partners. (Photo: tim.md, licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The five-year scientific partnership will ensure that experts are trained to secure various links in a supply chain (form smallest to largest) in order to prevent cyber attacks from spreading to every partners in a given supply chain system.

In recent years, a number of incidents have demonstrated the extent to which transport and logistics infrastructures have become prime targets for cyber attacks, causing availability and integrity problems for every link in a targeted supply chain.

In addition to attacks targeting SMEs associated with larger customers, energy supply chains have also been attacked in both North America and Europe. Given these developments, cyber security alone is no longer sufficient – it’s also necessary to ensure the cyber-resilience of the various links in an entire supply chain so that it can quickly return to a satisfactory state of operation and safety following an attack.

THREE AREAS of research

Supported financially by MITACS, the CRITiCAL Chair is focused on the development of innovative solutions to ensure the cyber-resilience of transport and logistics infrastructures. Maritime transport infrastructures - in particular ports - will be the topic of this Chair’s first case study.

The Chair’s work will focus on three areas of research. In addition to identifying and analysing the type of threats that target transport and logistics systems, the group will also develop artificial intelligence techniques to strengthen the cyber-resilience of these systems, as well as tools to measure the resilience of a logistics chain.

Full Professor Nora Boulahia Cuppens (Department of Computer and Software Engineering), is delighted with this announcement. "The creation of the CRITiCAL Chair demonstrates once again how the concentration of expertise in cybersecurity and cyber-resilience at Polytechnique Montréal makes it an ideal place to conduct both national and international research collaborations," she notes.

Professor Cuppens also highlights that students trained as part of this Chair’s activities will benefit greatly from the contributions of IRT SystemX – who are closely connected to problems encountered by industrial partners.

"We’re excited to be able to count on IRT SystemX as a partner, in order to have direct access to the problems encountered by its partners in the real world. Together, we’ll be able to develop solutions that truly meet the needs of those in transport and supply chains, in addition to training a new generation of cyber-resilience experts."

Students participating in the CRITiCAL Chair will be co-supervised by the two academic institutions, and will carry out their work in both Montréal at Polytechnique Montréal, and in Saclay, a suburb of Paris, France. In total, six doctoral students, two post-doctoral students, and two master's students will be supervised by IRT SystemX's research engineers and Polytechnique Montréal's research professors.

LEARN MORE

Professor Nora Boulahia Cuppens expertise
Department of Computer and Software Engineering website (In French)
SystemX website
MITACS website